Daddy' A Clove One Shot
by S. EJ Tapson
Summary: The truth behind Clove's cold eyes. One Shot. This is not a romantic story. Enjoy.


It was raining. Heavily. It always seemed to rain when Clove was feeling upset, like the sky shared her anxieties. She wasn't really used to feeling scared, alone, or lost, but on odd occasions, she had to succumb to the odd fearful emotion. It wasn't like she was a happy person, he past had made her permanently sarcastic, foul and moody. When I say _permanently_, I really mean 'to every other being apart from the guy who has just walked into the train door'.

"Hey," he says as he settles beside Clove. "Heard you were up all night last night."

Clove turned towards Cato, crossing her arms protectively. "No. Well, yes. But I wasn't having nightmares or anything."

"Homesick?" Cato pressed. Clove shrugged, but nodded. "Yeah, I get that." He didn't really, but it made him sound knowing and intelligent, which didn't often occur. "Who've you got back in two?"

Cato felt he ought to have known more about Clove, but they hadn't really interacted, apart that one time when they were both training in the District Two gym.

"You're really small," He had noted aloud. He blushed, knowing that his mother had warned him about picking on people for their height. ("D'you remember, in the Games a few years ago, that tiny kid got so angry with everyone for thinking he was a dumb underdog, that he picked up an axe and killed them all? Don't be one of those kids who had their heads sewn on spikes.")

"Well, you're way too tall!" Clove had countered.

Come on, they were eight!

And that was all that they knew about each other. That one was tall, one was small. Although, Cato mentally noted that Clove was feisty, and Clove mentally noted that Cato acts before he thinks.

"Well… My dad worked in one of the huge factories, in fact, the very biggest. He would makes a lot of money, and he was well respected by the people worked with. He was highly ranked in his job, and he would often go out to drink with his boss. But then, he suddenly lost it. He'd always had a thing with his anger. Like if he'd had a bad day at work, he would bottle it all up so that he wasn't demoted, and then he'd bring it all out on me, and my brother Siam. He was older though, and as soon as he was 18, he moved out. He did care for me though, but he hated my father more than he liked me. it was obviously too much stress for him to wait until his little sister was old enough to join him. And my mother, well, she moved out ages ago, and I'd never seen her until, well, I'll come back to that.

"But now, when I win the games, I'm not letting my father step one foot over my doorway into my new house. Anyway, he lost it. He couldn't bottle it up any longer. One of the bosses' assistant's was running about, frantic. Apparently, someone had dropped a hammer down one of the machinery engines, and that had caused that bit of machine to stop working. It was like a domino effect. Hammers were dropped into the machine's engines, and they stopped. Some conveyer belt making the hammers had malfunctioned.

Anyway, again, the assistant was waving his arms in the air, completely melting down, when he accidently hit my father in the face.

He was quick to apologise, my dad just freaked. He hit the man back, punched the nearest person, and then stopped. The guy who he had punched was his boss."

Clove took a breather, having never spoken that much in five minutes in her life.

"And so he lost his job?"

"Yes," Clove replied, sipping from some fizzy pink drink she'd found.

"And so how did you survive without the money?" Cato asked, looking genuinely interested in what she had to say.

"Well, I was packed off to my mother's. She welcomed me, slightly grudgingly, into her poky little flat. She was kinder than Father, but she always had a new boyfriend every week. Never settling down, never finding a real job. The, er, un-settle-ness made me anxious. Which doesn't happen often," she smiled. "But I stuck with it. Training took my mind off things. Like Father, and Mother, and her new boyfriend, off Siam, and the drunken rows my father used to have with him."

Cato almost broke down for her, being weak, while Clove stayed strong, as hard as rock, as she had trained to contain her emotions for all those years.

"But, he didn't actually _hurt_ you, did he?" Cato asked, his face stricken.

Clove cocked an eyebrow, laughed coldly. "No, not in _that_ way."

Cato relaxed, nodding gently. "So there's no lasting damage. Nothing to really remind you of him."

"Really? I wouldn't be so sure myself." Clove said her voice of ice, as she remembered _that_ night.

"Wait, what?..."

Clove grabbed her shirt, and pulled it down just far enough so that Cato could see the long, thin scar that stretched all along Clove's collarbone.

"I've got Daddy to thank for this."


End file.
